Obama adviser worries Israel supporters

Barack Obama is outlining his views on the Iraq war in a major speech Wednesday in Iowa, and bringing along a gray-haired source of foreign policy gravitas: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, who says that Obama offers “a new definition of America's role in the world.”

With the gravity, though, comes some baggage.

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Brzezinski, 79, stepped into the crossfire this summer when he published an essay in the summer issue of the journal Foreign Policy, defending a controversial new book about the power of the “Israel Lobby” in American politics.

The book’s authors, Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, thanked him for his “incisive defense.”

But the article inserted him into one of the most heated debates in America-Israel politics, a bitter dispute about whether the authors’ claims smacked of bigotry, whether their critics are – as Brzezinski put it — “McCarthyite.”

“It is a tremendous mistake for Barack Obama to select as a foreign policy adviser the one person in public life who has chosen to support a bigoted book,” said Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, one of the most visible critics of the Walt and Mearsheimer volume, titled “The Israel Lobby.” (Dershowitz has contributed to the campaign of Obama’s leading rival, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.)

Obama has already distanced himself from the book, with his campaign saying in a statement earlier this week that “the idea that supporters of Israel have somehow distorted U.S. foreign policy, or that they are responsible for the debacle in Iraq, is just wrong. And Obama’s positions on Middle East affairs are, like his main rivals’, within the American political mainstream and firmly in favor of Israeli’s aggressive security policy."

Still, Obama has faced occasional criticism from elements of the pro-Israel community. This spring, for instance, he raised eyebrows by plugging the Middle East conflict into his standard stump speech, and telling an audience at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that “cynicism,” as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, posed a threat to Israel.

Obama supporters say there is no reason to question his pro-Israel bona fides.

“There are people in the community that question Barack’s commitment, but it’s not based on anything solid,” said the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, Ira Forman, who is neutral in the primary.

While “Brzezinski is not viewed very highly among people in the so-called ‘Israel lobby’,” other Obama advisor's – from the former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross to the veteran congressional staffer Dan Shapiro – are considered staunch allies, he said.

Brzezinski seen as 'obstacle'

Indeed, Obama has been as hard-line as any other senator on the issues surrounding Israel – barring, of course, the invasion of Iraq, whose supporters overlapped with conservative backers of Israel.

In particular, Obama has led an effort to press for American companies to pull investments from Iran.

Still, people involved in Jewish and America-Israel politics across the political spectrum expressed surprise at Brzezinski’s high profile in the campaign. Indeed, the former national security adviser has been at odds with elements of the American Jewish community since the Carter administration.

“Brzezinski was a major obstacle to bridging the divisions between the president and the Jewish community,” said Mark Siegel, who was Carter’s Jewish liaison until resigning in 1978 in a dispute over the sale of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. “I’m very, very surprised that someone would have him directly involved in a presidential campaign.”